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PAKISTAN & TERRORISM
In the history of the Indian civil aviation,
there have been 13 hijackings (including the latest to Kandahar), all involving the Indian
Airlines (IA) aircraft. Seven of these were carried out by groups with known links to
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the other six by groups or individuals
with no such links.
Of the seven ISI-linked groups, six were
indigenous (Sikh and Kashmiri terrorists) and the seventh (the latest) is a Pakistan-based
Islamic Jihadi terrorist group, which has been active in the Philippines, Myanmar, India,
the Central Asian Republics, the Xinjiang province of China and Chechnya and Dagestan in
Russia, and which claims to have trained a small group of Afro-American citizens of the US
in the past.
The fact that ISI-linked groups generally hijack
only IA and not Air India flights is due to the fact that during their training in
Pakistan, they are instructed by the ISI to avoid Air India flights, which are likely to
contain a large number of foreigners. This could create problems for Pakistan with Western
Governments and their intelligence agencies might focus their investigation on the
Pakistani involvement.
On January 30,1971, brothers Hashim and Ashraf
Quereshi of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front, armed with a pistol and a hand
grenade, hijacked Ganga, a Fokker Friendship aircraft of the Indian Airlines (IA), after
it had taken off from Srinagar for Jammu and forced the pilot to take it to Lahore.
After the aircraft had landed, Zuklfiquar Ali
Bhutto, then Foreign Minister under Yahya Khan, rushed to Lahore, fraternised with the
hijackers and helped them get maximum international publicity for their cause. On February
1, he persuaded them to release the crew and passengers who were sent by road to Amritsar.
The Government of India sought the permission of
the Pakistani authorities to send a replacement crew to fly the aircraft back to India.
The ISI handed over to the hijackers explosives with which they blew up the aircraft the
next day.
On February 4, in retaliation, Indira Gandhi, the
then Prime Minister, banned all Pakistani civil and military overflights through Indian
airspace, which remained in force till the normalisation of relations after the Shimla
Agreement. The consequent aggravation of the logistic difficulties of the Pakistan army in
the then East Pakistan partly contributed to its debacle in its war with India in December
1971.
The Dal Khalsa, a Sikh extremist group that came
into being in the late 1970s, took to hijacking as a weapon of intimidation in 1981.
Between September 29,1981, and August 24, 1984, it hijacked four IA aircraft and took them
to Lahore. The hijackers of September 29,1981, were overpowered by Pakistani commandos and
the released passengers, crew and aircraft returned to India.
The Zia-ul-Haq regime turned down the request of
the Govt. of India to hand over the hijackers to India for trial and said they would be
tried before a Pakistani court. Instead of doing so, it allowed the hijackers to live in
the Nankana Sahib gurudwara at Lahore, from where they were directing the terrorist
activities of the Dal Khalsa in Punjab. The Govt. of India repeatedly brought this to the
notice of the US, but Washington was reluctant to act against the Zia regime, which had
started playing an important role for the US in Afghanistan.
However, in 1982, the Zia regime refused
permission to two hijacked planes to land in Lahore and forced them back to Amritsar,
where the hijacking was terminated by the Indian authorities.
Dr.Jagjit Singh Chauhan of the so-called
Khalistan movement based in London, and Ganga Singh Dhillon of the Washington-based
Nankana Sahib Foundation, who was a close personal friend of Zia, strongly protested to
Zia over the refusal of permission.
When a fourth IA plane was hijacked by the Sikh
terrorists to Lahore on August 24,1984, Zia, therefore, ordered the ISI to permit it to
land, help the hijackers to meet the media and then persuade them to go away to Dubai. The
ISI found that the hijackers had intimidated the pilot only with a toy pistol. They,
therefore, gave them a German pistol with ammunition.
After terminating the hijacking at Dubai, the
local authorities handed over to the Indian officials the hijackers and the pistol given
to them at Lahore.The Govt. of India referred the pistol to the West German authorities,
who replied in writing that the pistol, manufactured in Germany, was part of a consignment
sold to the Pakistan Government by the German manufacturers.
The Govt. of India brought this German report to
the notice of Washington and sought action against the Zia regime. Under US pressure, Zia
ordered the removal of the Dal Khalsa hijackers from the Nankana Sahib to the Lahore jail.
They were tried and sentenced to imprisonment, on completion of which expelled from
Pakistan. Thereafter, there was no ISI-inspired hijacking till Gen.Pervez Musharraf seized
power on October 12,1999.
In 1992, the Narasimha Rao Government shared with
Washington a wealth of evidence gathered by the Indian agencies regarding Pakistani State
sponsorship of terrorism in India and urged that Pakistan should be declared a State
sponsor of terrorism under the US laws and economic sanctions imposed against it.
Washington expressed its inability to act on the
basis of Indian evidence on the ground that most of it was circumstantial and not direct
and that much of it was based on interrogation reports, which, in the eyes of the US law,
are suspect unless independently corroborated by documentary or technical evidence.
After the Mumbai blasts of March, 1993, the
Narasimha Rao Govt. decided to invite the counter-terrorism experts of the US and other
Western countries to visit the spot immediately after the blasts and make their own
examination of the scene of the crime. The idea was that if their experts concluded that
Pakistan was behind the blasts, even if they did not share this with their Indian
counterparts, they would, at least, go back and tell their political leadership about it.
An Austrian expert, who came to India, gave in
writing that the hand grenades used by the terrorists in Mumbai while escaping after the
blasts had been manufactured in an ordnance factory of the Pakistan Government with
technology and machine tools supplied by the Austrian company.
The US experts told their Indian counterparts
that a timer found with an unexploded explosive device looked suspiciously American and
wanted to take it to the US for examination. They were allowed to do so. Later, they sent
to New Delhi an unsigned written report (a non paper) that their examination had
established that the timer was of US-origin and was part of a consignment of timers
supplied by the US army to Pakistan's.
The Govt. of India pointed out that this was the
clinching corroborative evidence, which they had always wanted, and that, therefore, they
should not have any further difficulty in declaring Pakistan a State-sponsor of terrorism.
US officials expressed their inability to do so
on the ground that there was considerable leakage of arms and ammunition and explosives
from the Pakistan army stocks to smugglers and that the recovery of this timer in Mumbai
did not necessarily mean that it was given to the terrorists by an official agency of
Pakistan. According to them, to declare a country as a State sponsor of terrorism,
conclusive evidence of the complicity of an official agency and knowledge, if not
approval, of such complicity by the political leadership was essential.
After rejecting the Indian plea, Washington made
its own assessment of ISI involvement in terrorism in India and forced Mr.Nawaz Sharif,
the then Prime Minister, to remove from the ISI its then Director-General, Lt.Gen.Javed
Nasir, and a number of his senior officers who, Washington believed, had a role in
promoting terrorism.
While this action was good in so far as it went,
it did not help the Government of India since their successors continued to organise
terrorist acts in Indian territory. The US action against the ISI officers, however,
resulted in an important change in the ISI's modus operandi (MO).
Previously, the ISI used to interact directly
with the Sikh, Kashmiri and other terrorist groups from India and run the training camps
for them with the help of serving officers. Since then, it has been increasingly using
private Islamic terrorist organisations for supplying money and equipment to the
terrorists in India and for running the training camps in Afghan territory, instead of in
Pakistani territory.
Among such organisations used by the ISI are the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), previously known as the Harkat-ul-Ansar, which was declared by
the US as an international terrorist organisation in October, 1997, the Lashkar-e-Toiba,
the Al Badr and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. All these organisations are members of bin
Laden's International Islamic Front (also called the International Islamic Salvation
Front) for Jihad Against the US and Israel.
There is the following strong evidence of the
HUM's involvement in the Kandahar hijacking: the only phone call claiming responsibility
came from an Islamic Salvation Front; there were identical names in the lists of prisoners
whose release was demanded by the phone-caller and by the hijackers; the prisoners, whose
release was demanded, were Pakistani nationals or of Pakistani origin and belonged to the
HUM.
The involvement of the ISI and the Pakistan army
with these organisations and particularly the HUM, would be evident from the following:
* These organisations function openly in Pakistan and their annual
conventions are attended by serving officers of the army and political leaders. They and
their leaders address press conferences, give interviews and issue statements giving
details of their terrorist
activities in India and other countries. The Army has not taken any action against
them--not even against the HUM, which has been declared an international terrorist
organisation by the US.
* The investigastion and trial in 1995 by the Benazir
Bhutto regime of a group of army officers headed by Major-Gen.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi
arrested on a charge of planning a coup brought out that all the arrested officers had
close links with the HUM. Mr.M.H.Askari , the well-known Pakistani columnist, wrote in the
"Dawn" (October 18,1995) as follows: " It is said that the plotters had
close links with the Hizbul Mujahideen and the Harkat-ul-Ansar, which are known for their
involvement in international terrorism. It is also said that the arrested officers wanted
Pakistan to become militarily involved in the Kashmir freedom struggle." It was said
that during their interrogation the arrested officers also implicated Gen. Pervez
Musharraf, then a Lt.Gen. and Director-General of Military Operations, but no action was
taken against him for want of evidence.
The Govt. of India should once again take up with
the US the question of declaring Pakistan a State-sponsor of Terrorism and with the
International Civil Aviation Organisation the question of advising member-countries to
suspend the Pakistan International Airways flights till Pakistan arrests and hands over
the hijackers and stops such acts of terrorism.
US officials have been repeatedly rejecting
Indian evidence of Pakistani sponsorship of terrorism as circumstantial and not direct,
but in the New York World Trade Centre and Oklahoma bombing cases, US courts have ruled
that in terrorism-related cases conviction could be based purely on circumstantial
evidence, if it was strong enough and provided a continuous chain of events.
B.RAMAN
(2-1-2000)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd),
Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical
Studies, Chennai.
E-Mail:corde@vsnl.com)
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